I have made a number of upgrades and changes to the website over the weekend. Software was upgraded, performance-enhancing software was installed, settings were tuned, and the top and bottom navigators were updated. I have been monitoring the server, checking the logs, and making small tweaks to tune everything. You should have seen a change in performance, for the better.

The only thing I am stuck on optimizing is InnoDB tables for the MySQL server. If someone has experience with that table type, please let me know. I made some settings, they seem to be fine, but I would prefer hearing from someone with experience.

Also, the message board now backs up every night (in the early morning hours).

Obviously, I am digging the new server and being able to tune things for Badmovies.org. If there is any little tweak someone would like to suggest or any error you encounter, just let me know (pm or post under this topic).

EDIT: The new version of the message board came out and I upgraded to it, but it does not support the advanced visual verification. Considering the number of bots that try to post, along with other spammers (you should see the error logs), I rolled us back to the prior version until that is upgraded to work with SMF 1.1 Gold (we are 1.1 RC3).

The only thing I am stuck on optimizing is InnoDB tables for the MySQL server. If someone has experience with that table type, please let me know. I made some settings, they seem to be fine, but I would prefer hearing from someone with experience.

Sorry, all my MySQL experience is with MyISAM tables. But, if you have any specific questions that may not be table specific, let me know. I probably won't have much to offer, but you never know.

To me, the two big generic db optimization tricks are:

(1) Don't use varchars where you can use integers, especially on columns that are used in the where part of "select...where" statements; think about how much faster a computer can compare integer numbers than search for strings/regular expressions, and(2) indexes, indexes, indexes.

Also, I saw a reference to an article just the other day that discusses they pros and cons of putting all your (related) data into one table vs. splitting into smaller, sorta 'reference list' tables. I did not read it, and don't recall specifically where it is, but if you think this might be helpful, let me know. I'll try to dig it back up. (I think I saw the reference in one of the MySQL references).

Good job on the upgrades....I HAVE noticed a difference.

Though to be honest, most of the big bottlenecks I've noticed in the past have been due to pulling up banners from OUTSIDE sources (not your own in-house hosted banner images). I guess there's some things you can never control.

I do not want to fool with the way SMF works, because that is a can of worms. Their default database creation looks pretty good and it made it easy to pick the tables to convert to InnoDB. I pretty much did all the search and log tables. Anything that has to update a lot (view counts, etc).

I just made some changes and restarted Apache and MySQL again. Testing settings for InnoDB and I increased the memory a PHP script may use. I think that I put the InnoDB settings too low, because the user_beancounters showed a drop in oomguarpages (still getting used to a VPS, but this appears to be memory used) and the value is well below my upper limit. The server has 704 MB RAM dedicated to Badmovies.org, with burst up to 2048 MB. My goal is to always stay within my guaranteed RAM. With the performance tweaks, that should be very possible.

That downtime was caused by me, due to the rollback to SMF 1.1 RC 3. Unfortunately, it was going to happen, but not until I restarted the database server (like I did after tweaking another setting). The issue is now fixed. My apologies. I should not be playing with her much more today.

(And not to bore everyone, I would pm him this info, but somebody might be trying to do the same type of tweaking as me and this information could help them - the message board does get indexed by search engines.)

The VPS is on a network by Knownhost.net. It is a dual Opteron server with RAID 10. The VPS is Virtuozzo, with CentOS. It has 704 MB dedicated RAM and 2048 MB bust RAM. We are averaging something like 25K pageviews a day. The message board, well you can see the stats for that. We often have about 10 to 20 users online, along with some spiders. The ads are served out by an program on the server called phpAdsNew. All of the tables for the ads database and the often changed tables for the message board are InnoDB.

The good thing is that the server looks rock solid now. It looks like we are now using a bit over 250 MB RAM right now, so there is plenty of burst capacity. She should be able to handle up to 3X the current traffic if it scales.

Also, PHP 5.2 with memory limit is set to 32M, which is limit per shmmax. MySQL is 5.0.27 and Apache is still 1.3 series.

Man, you should see the number of bots that try to register/post to the message board. Along with all the ones still looking for the old message board at "bbs" and the old comments system. It must run into the hundreds. They do not load any pages, just go right to submitting a post (which is denied).